Dell Boomi Revamps Online Community for iPaaS, MDM and API Management

Dell Boomi has revamped its online community to make it faster and easier for integration professionals to leverage iPaaS, API Management and master data management for business benefits. The redesigned Dell Boomi Community provides several ways to find quick and detailed answers to solve today’s integration problems.

Dell Boomi has revamped its online community to make it faster and easier for integration professionals to leverage iPaaS, API Management and master data management for business benefits.

The redesigned Dell Boomi Community provides several ways to find quick and detailed answers to solve today’s integration problems – and aims to help developers and middleware professionals learn how the company’s AtomSphere cloud integration, APIs and MDM can form the basis of innovative digital transformation projects.

“Integration is becoming more critical and essential to digital enterprise initiatives, but still it’s not often seen by businesses as important to revenues or innovation. So, we see community as an awfully big deal,” Chris McNabb, Dell Boomi general manager told IDN. “Our developers and users are going very broad with Dell Boomi’s integration capabilities because they have a broad set of things they are trying to accomplish. We’re not just connecting app A to app B. We’re letting customers connect people, systems, data and things to drive engagement.

In this context, the revamped the Dell Boomi Community is designed to “play an instrumental role in helping our customers achieve success. . . and deliver integration that always works to drive business outcomes,” McNabb added.

The Growth of Any-To-Any Integrations – Time A Bigger Factor

The changes to the Dell Boomi community come as adopters of iPaaS solutions across vendors look to expand their reputation as methods that can dramatically improve time-to-value. “With demands for more and more mobile and cloud applications, we’re hearing our customer say they need integration projects done faster and faster,” McNabb said.

In fact, we’re seeing those ‘unit of measure’ for the time it should take to deliver integration shrinking in a big way – from weeks a few years ago, to now days and even hours.”

Why the rapid escalation in the need for speed?

McNabb sums it up in one word: Change.

“Stability over time was the way things were done, and so the amount of new requests for integration just weren’t that great,” McNabb said. He gave an example shared by many Dell Boomi customers. Not many years ago, major systems such as SAP were meant to be stable. The versions weren’t updated that frequently, and the number of integrations were limited, known and well-planned or on a specified roadmap.

That was then. This is now – and demands on iPaaS, APIs and MDM have escalated.

“That seems like ancient history. Today, all sizes of company, from SMB to the largest enterprises are always confronting change,” McNabb said. “Just run through the list: mobile apps, smart devices, SaaS apps, IoT, APIs – they’re all driving up demand for integration.”

This spike in demand for faster integration is not only driven by the adding-on of new endpoints. Even the endpoints themselves are constantly changing or updating. “We’re seeing customers struggle to keep up with needs for net-new integrations. As an example, when Salesforce.com comes out with something new, that can mean you need to change to your existing integration,” he added.

The Dell Boomi Community has been designed to get results as quickly as possible, and let developers cut down the number of minutes they spend in an IDE to as few as possible, he added. Some capabilities Dell Boomi focused on to promote faster integration projects are:

Notifications. To stay up to date on tips, how-to stories, product releases and features

Gamification for Community Building. To encourage all Dell Boomi users, including system integrators, to earn reputation points by interacting with the community and sharing their expertise

Modern integration technologies are also playing an expanding role in the tasks of simply and reliably moving data to where it needs to be, McNabb added. Nowhere is that more evident than in big data.

“iPaaS provides a lot of features for reliable data movement, and Dell Boomi supports a variety of big data scenarios for customers,” McNabb said. Dell Boomi is helping customers track clicks in web apps as well as all types of immediate events that occur in real-time. We’ve been getting iPaaS to work with native queuing, APIs and even real-time approaches. “Helping our customers get more and faster value from data, even from data that wasn’t used just several years ago, is another focus area for our community.”